13 Replies Latest reply on Mar 8, 2007 9:49 AM by fabricio.lemos

    JSF IDE support

    suresk

      I've been using JSF and JPA/Hibernate for several years now, and really like these technologies, despite a few pain points involved in using them. Seam has solved most of them, except for one big one: IDE Support.

      I'm not necessarily interested in GUI layout or drag-and-drop support for JSF, but I'm really interested in two things:

      1) Auto-complete

      This may seem silly and lazy, but I lose a fair amount of time switching back and forth between my Java objects and my xhtml pages, trying to figure out what everything is named. I also make stupid typos, which is really embarrassing when trying to show off JSF and JPA in front of other people :)

      I guess it is more of an annoyance than anything, but it would save a fair amount of time.

      2) Refactoring

      This is the big one, in my book. In my opinion, refactoring is an important part of software development, yet the way we use JSF and JPA together, it is very difficult to refactor with confidence. And, since JSF pages aren't compiled, you don't find out you've messed something up until you try to use that page - and even then, it may take the proper combination of variables to see the problem. A 100% comprehensive set of web tests would fix this, but on a decent-sized project, those could take quite a while to run.

      I realize that IDE tools are probably outside the scope of Seam, but this is right down the alley of using JSF and JPA together, so I thought I'd pose the question here. So, I'm wondering a few things:

      1) What things have other people done to alleviate this problems?

      2) Are there any ongoing IDE projects anyone is aware of?

      3) Is this (#2) exactly why we shouldn't be using entity objects in the view layer? I like a lot of the benefits you get from not creating DTOs everywhere, but other developers I work with have expressed concerns about the idea. The larger our project gets, the more I start to see their side of it.

        • 1. Re: JSF IDE support
          gavin.king

          This is what we will get from the Exadel partnership :-)

          • 2. Re: JSF IDE support
            suresk

            Yeah, how funny is that? I post here on the forum and my blog, and the very next morning you guys announce something that is exactly like I was talking about. Now that's what I call being responsive to your users ;)

            Seriously though, that is great news - it really should make Seam (and other JEE) development a whole lot more pleasant.

            • 3. Re: JSF IDE support
              lisaanm

              Hi.,
              These features are already working in Exadel studio (free version too). I'm using it for more than 6 months and its working pretty fine.


              NOTE: But with SEAM you cannot access session bean (managed bean) properties on XHTML becos the editor takes the bean from faces-config managed bean declaration.

              Hope this would be fixed with RedHat developer studio.

              • 4. Re: JSF IDE support
                gavin.king

                Its already fixed, but I'm not sure if the fix is in the latest release of Studio. It will definitely be in the first release of RHDS.

                • 5. Re: JSF IDE support

                  That may actually be the most wanted feature :)

                  • 6. Re: JSF IDE support
                    fabricio.lemos

                    It woud be great if RHDS have some features like the ones in JSFToolbox

                    http://www.jsftoolbox.com/products/index.jsf

                    • 7. Re: JSF IDE support

                      I have walked through all the features of jsftoolbox and still did not quite realize what the current Exadel Studio misses in contrast to jsftoolbox. Could you point me to the right direction?

                      • 8. Re: JSF IDE support
                        stephen.friedrich

                        IntelliJ IDEA starting from version 6.0 supports Seam out of the box including code completion, erro highlighting, find usages and refactoring.

                        • 9. Re: JSF IDE support
                          maxandersen

                          guys - any bugs and/or ideas you have is welcome in http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/RHDS

                          • 10. Re: JSF IDE support
                            lisaanm

                            Hi.,
                            Self reply to my post:


                            These features are already working in Exadel studio (free version too). I'm using it for more than 6 months and its working pretty fine.

                            NOTE: But with SEAM you cannot access session bean (managed bean) properties on XHTML becos the editor takes the bean from faces-config managed bean declaration.

                            Hope this would be fixed with RedHat developer studio.



                            Fix:
                            Just drop SessionBean (managed bean) declarations in faces-config.


                            For me Seam application is working eventhough I define beans in faces-config but is not advised according to SEAM specification.

                            Could Gavin explain the consequences of having bean declarations in faces-config file?

                            Thanks

                            • 11. Re: JSF IDE support
                              dajevtic

                              Can anyone explain what RHDS will mean for JbossIDE? Will it be merged into RHDS?

                              • 12. Re: JSF IDE support
                                pmuir
                                • 13. Re: JSF IDE support
                                  fabricio.lemos

                                   

                                  "SergeySmirnov" wrote:
                                  I have walked through all the features of jsftoolbox and still did not quite realize what the current Exadel Studio misses in contrast to jsftoolbox. Could you point me to the right direction?


                                  One of them is error highlighting for facelets pages: http://forum.exadel.com/viewtopic.php?t=5575

                                  It is a really basic feature, so I did not even try the other ones in Exadel Studio, also because it was not very stable. I was using 4.0.2 version.